1. The Field of the Present System
The present system relates to a graphical user interface enabling users to interface with a computing operating system. In particular, the present system relates to multimedia presentation document creating and editing software, including for example power point presentations, acrobat pdf files, desktop publishing software, and HTML documents which are the basis of the World Wide Web.
2. Description of the Related Art
The inspiration behind the invention presented here originates from a problem inherent to Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) documents which form the basis of the multimedia web pages out of which the World Wide Web is made. The Web is an immense collection of multimedia documents, called pages, distributed throughout the filing systems of server computers in which each page can have multiple hyperlinks to other pages on other servers and in which servers are accessible to a user of a computer, called a client, connected to the internet. The HTML markup language defines the display elements and attributes to be applied by a computer in rendering or drawing the page an essential element of which is the href element also known as a hyperlink.
The specific problem with HTML is that a rendered HTML page displayed on a computer monitor is not amenable to direct editing by a user via a user interface for directly modifying (adding, deleting, editing) any HTML element in the display including any attribute of an HTML element. The developer of HTML, Tim Berners-Lee, envisioned early on that a single software program for browsing (viewing) and for creating and editing web pages directly from its display is desired. It has been dubbed the read-write web. The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) maintains an open source project called Amaya which targets this goal, but to this day the separation between web browsers and web editors has not only dominated the industry but has increased. There are of course wikis, blogs and social networks like Facebook where a user is provided an interface to input data that results in modifications of displayed HTML, but the fact remains, there is no web browser that permits the loading and presentation of any HTML and enables users to modify (add, delete, edit) any HTML element and any attribute of any HTML element in a display and save them back to the server. The reason the problem exists is that HTML elements as defined and displayed on computer monitors are not equipped with events that users can trigger via input devices such as mouse or keyboard which then present the user with means of creating new html elements or editing attributes of existing ones. The result is that learning HTML web page creation and editing is difficult in terms of the effort and time one must invest to become modestly proficient at it. The separation of software for creating and editing web pages from the software for displaying and interacting with them results in slowing the process of web page creation and editing because developers must frequently test each web page during development by loading it into a browser to determine if it meets design specifications and works correctly.